LITMIR.BIZ

      Massimo lay under his bed sheets, eyes wide open. He’d drunk enough bourbon to tranquillise an elephant but his mind was too busy. Except now it wasn’t the project he’d spent over a year working on that stopped his mind switching off.

      Turning his head, eyes adjusted to the dark, he watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Livia’s duvet. He guessed she’d been asleep for around an hour now. He always knew when she was properly asleep and not just faking it. When she faked it, she lay rigid in absolute silence.

      They’d slept together the first night they’d met—once they’d got talking at the hotel bar he hadn’t let her out of his sight—and both of them had known it was no one-night stand. He’d been dozing in the aftermath, Livia wrapped in his arms, his body thrumming with the delights they’d just shared, when she’d mumbled something. That was his first experience of her sleep-talking. He’d quickly discovered that she talked a lot in her sleep. Sometimes the words were distinct. He remembered the feeling that had erupted through him the first time she’d mumbled his name. It had been ten times the magnitude of what he’d felt to be offered two hundred million dollars for the stupid game he’d developed during his boring university evenings.

      But her dreams hadn’t always been good. At least once a week he’d had to wake her from a bad one. The darkness of the life she’d lived until she’d left Naples at eighteen still haunted her.

      Had another man woken her from the nightmares since she’d left him?

      He pinched the bridge of his nose and willed the pain spearing him away.

      Livia’s sex life was no longer his business.

      The thought of her with a lover was something that hadn’t even occurred to him until she’d stepped onto his plane and now it was all he could think of.

      In the four months since she’d left him, his own libido had gone into hibernation. From the feelings erupting through him now, he realised he’d shut down far more than his libido.

      He’d shut down long before she’d left him.

      Their marriage had begun with such high hopes and such certainty. They’d both been too foolish to realise that it was nothing but lust, a flaming passion that could only burn itself out.

      He’d been intoxicated by her. He’d never met anyone like her: tough on the outside but marshmallow-soft inside. Straight talking. Capable of lancing with her tongue. But tender and compassionate. Someone who would drop everything if she were needed. Someone who would give everything they had if it were needed. Massimo had never been one for showing his emotions but being tactile with Livia had come naturally. She’d brought that side of him out right from the start.

      And then the tide had turned. His assumptions that he would be able to continue his life and work in the same way he always had but with his beautiful, vivacious wife to come home to had been quickly dispelled.

      He should never have married her, that was the truth of it, but he’d been so swept up in the need to tie her to him and make her his in every way possible that he’d blinded himself to what marriage to a woman like Livia would actually entail. It entailed far more than he could give.